UPC: Spend Only What You Need on Hardware

Ukrainian Processing Center

The Ukrainian Processing Center supports banks in Ukraine and other Central and Eastern Europe countries with processing services and software. It currently serves 24 banks in Ukraine and 10 banks in Eastern Europe, providing card payment, merchant acquiring, ATM channel management and ecommerce services. Founded in Kiev in 1997, it was the first processor in CEE to receive MSP and TPP status from Visa and Mastercard. In 2005, UPC became part of Raiffeisen Bank International, the Austrian-based international financial holding company.

The Need

When UPC began to plan an upgrade of its servers, it needed to run a load test to make sure that the new server configuration would meet required transaction processing time. In order to facilitate this upgrade, UPC needed:

a simulator that could generate a large volume of transaction requests to a processing server

a mechanism to count requests sent and responses received, providing a detailed report on activity for every second of processing time

enter specific criteria for each test and to view reporting results.

The Solution

Customized load testing tool

To accomplish this task, Softjourn designed and developed a POS devices simulator as a multi-threaded service for Linux, with a Unix domain socket interface. This service sets up virtual POS terminals and generates transaction traffic to a specified processing server. The service performs extended logging, which helps identify problems, such as when the transaction server fails to process all requests.

Undertake the exact tests needed

Softjourn’s solution included a web interface through which UPC personnel are able to enter specific criteria for each test and to view reported results. The web interface was implemented using PHP and communicates with the service via a Unix domain socket.

Achievements of the project

A fast Linux application capable of generating a large volume of transaction requests.

Confidence in the tests run. Scalability.

Ukrainian Processing Center

The Ukrainian Processing Center supports banks in Ukraine and other Central and Eastern Europe countries with processing services and software. It currently serves 24 banks in Ukraine and 10 banks in Eastern Europe, providing card payment, merchant acquiring, ATM channel management and ecommerce services. Founded in Kiev in 1997, it was the first processor in CEE to receive MSP and TPP status from Visa and Mastercard. In 2005, UPC became part of Raiffeisen Bank International, the Austrian-based international financial holding company.

The Benefits

Efficiency – more tasks handled by operations staff due to a new reporting system on failures, actions performed and requests to the servers.